Chapter 3 - The Bloodline Awakens
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Nancy’s knees buckled slightly, but she caught herself against the heavy wooden counter.
She looked at Anias, her eyes brimming with five years of buried terror and bitter resentment.
“Your family did,” she whispered, each word cutting deeper than any blade Anias had ever faced in the back alleys of Boston.
Anias went completely still.
The radiator hissed beneath the window sill, spitting drops of hot moisture into the air.
“What did you say?” Anias demanded, his tone dangerously calm.
Nancy adjusted Leland in her arms, feeling the little boy’s heart fluttering against her ribs like a frightened bird.
“Two days after I told you I was pregnant, your cousin Mateo showed up at our apartment while you were in Chicago,” she said, her voice shaking with righteous fury.
“He sat at our kitchen table, Anias.”
“He placed a revolver on the marble counter right next to my prenatal vitamins.”
“He told me that a don cannot be burdened by a weak woman and a bastard born out of duty.”
Anias felt the blood drain from his face, leaving behind a cold, murderous vacuum.
“Mateo told me that if I didn’t vanish that very night, he would make sure neither I nor the baby survived until sunrise,” she choked out.
“He told me you agreed with him.”
“He told me you had already chosen your empire over a domestic nightmare, and that you sent him to clean up the mess before your coronation as head of the family.”
“That is a lie!” Anias roared, taking a violent step forward before catching himself as Leland flinched.
He stopped dead in his tracks, horrified that his sudden movement had frightened his own flesh and blood.
Anias fell to one knee right there on the dusty linoleum floor, lowering his massive frame so he was no longer towering over the boy.
The posture was one of total submission, an act no living man had ever witnessed from the ruthless head of the Moretti syndicate.
“I never knew, Nancy,” Anias whispered, his chest heaving, his voice trembling with an agony he could no longer conceal.
“I swore on my father’s grave that I would protect you.”
“When Mateo brought me those clinic papers with your forged signature, it ripped my soul out of my chest.”
“I thought you hated me so much that you would rather destroy my child than let him carry my bloodline.”
Nancy stared down at him, her lips parting in stunned disbelief.
The sheer torment etched into the harsh angles of his face was undeniable.
A man like Anias Moretti never knelt, never pleaded, and never showed a single crack in his iron armor.
Yet here he was, kneeling in fabric scraps and dust, looking up at them with raw, bleeding devastation.
Leland shifted in Nancy’s embrace, sensing the sudden shift in the room’s heavy energy.
He squirmed gently until his sneakers touched the floor.
Nancy tried to catch his wrist, but the little boy was drawn by an invisible, powerful tether.
He walked forward on unsteady little legs, his small shoes squeaking against the floorboards.
Leland stopped inches from the towering man kneeling before him.
The boy tilted his head, his wide gray eyes searching the dark, weathered face of the stranger.
He raised a tiny, warm hand, sticky with the residue of an afternoon lollipop, and pressed his fingers against Anias’s stubbled jawline.
“You’re the man from the picture,” Leland said softly, his innocent voice cutting through the suffocating gloom.
A single tear escaped Anias’s eye, tracing down through the dark stubble of his cheek.
He lifted his large, calloused hand, moving as slowly as if approaching a wild animal, and gently covered the boy’s tiny fingers.
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“I am your papa, little one,” Anias whispered, his throat closing around the words.
“And no one will ever hide you from me again.”
